NBC Sports' 1992 TripleCast from Barcelona, Spain, is designed for the sports junkie who can't find enough Olympic events to watch on the regular broadcast menu ... and to open the door to pay television for the network.

Open your wallet wide enough and between July 26 and Aug. 9 you can gorge yourself by zapping in and out of three live events simultaneously, around the clock, in what is the first pay-per-view coverage of an Olympics. It'll be kind of like clicking your way through three different Sunday afternoon football games at the same time, except that TripleCast's multiple arenas will be commercial-free. You, not the sponsors, will be paying for the time.

NBC was awarded broadcast rights for a record-setting $401 million, and, partnered with Cablevision Systems Corp., hopes to avoid the loss it suffered at the Seoul Summer Games in 1988 when broadcast rights costs the network $100 million less. Currently, the only way to overcome dreary financial circumstances within the television industry "is to create supplementary revenue," said Ellen Cooper, NBC vice president of public relations for TripleCast. "The marketplace demands you become more creative. Networks have changed their manner of broadcasting. Look at the last Winter Olympics and the partnership CBS created with Turner. We'll probably never again see a single entity presenting the Olympics. It is too expensive."

So, using local cable companies as their delivery mechanism, NBC Cable expects to provide an Olympics marathon as the ultimate in narrow-casting. Viewers may order one of four separate viewing bundles ranging in price from $29.95 per day to $170 for the total 15-day package plus memorabilia by calling 1-800-OLYMPIC or their cable company.

Three channels, designated as the Red, White and Blue channels, will operate around the clock simultaneously for 1,080 hours. Half of them will be live-as-they-happen events airing from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; the other half replay the day's events. Viewers may direct their own viewing choices from among more than 90 events, divided rather precisely into categories as follows: Red Channel, swimming, boxing, track and field, baseball and synchronized swimming; White Channel, gymnastics and rhythmic gymnastics, diving and platform diving, equestrian and tennis, and Blue Channel, basketball, volleyball, wrestling and water polo.

NBC and its broadcast affiliates will present customary over-the-air coverage as well, 161 free hours worth. But since Barcelona time is six hours ahead of the eastern United States, the broadcast Summer Olympics will be seen on a tape-delayed basis for the first time since Munich in 1972. That means the viewer will usually know the results before sitting down to watch.

So, the first long-form Olympics on cable will be rather like tuning into live C-Span coverage of a Senate hearing. You'll get it all from exquisite detail to moribund dead spots, sitting through an entire event from preliminaries through heats and finals.

You won't necessarily get a lock on "better" events by investing in TripleCast; you will necessarily get more exposure to them, and in greater depth. "There is really no exclusivity on either side," said Cooper. "It's more a matter of the long form being seen live and the broadcast side being more edited and compressed. They pretty much won't co-mingle. They have completely separate production facilities, camera crews and on-air people for the most part."

Bob Costas, along with Dick Enberg and "Today's" Katie Couric, for example, will be broadcast hosts while TripleCast cable will have four in-studio hosts: Don Criqui, Kathleen Sullivan, Ahmad Rashad and Gayle Gardner. Each has a separate group of "expert" commentators, the expertise more heavily weighted on the side of the cablecast where commentators will assume greater in-depth knowledge on the part of the viewer, who has opted to purchase the nuts and bolts of a sport.

"There is some overlap," Cooper said, "like Chris Evert will be doing all the tennis. But Ahmad Rashad is only with us (TripleCast) for instance, and Frank Shorter (men's marathon), George Hirsch (the publisher of Rodale Magazine's Runner's World, who'll do track and field commentary with Bruce Jenner), Peter Vidmar and Julianne McNamara (gymnastics) are only on pay-per-view, where some, like Gayle Gardner, will do one weekend with the broadcast side as well as her duties with us."